Seven Loves

by Valerie Trueblood

  She could imagine the arranging of possibilities that excused them, the relief.

  On the train she held the test papers in her lap but her eyes closed and she slept through the miles. She dreamed she was on a train with a man she didn’t know, and had inadvertently begun kissing and caressing him. She knew something was amiss about it but she couldn’t stop. The heat of the situation was tangled up with some feeling of herself as a child, when pure joy could attack you out of nowhere and force you to leap and run. But she couldn’t be a child, because of what she was going to do. No, she was grown, she was free to do this, she must do it. But the dream ended before they could find a place to lie down.

  When she saw Cole she trembled. She thought, for the first time, There’s something the matter with me.

  Was this torment? For he, Nathanael, had been on his knees. This should not have surprised her but it did, making her wonder about the other surprises, given time, and a different world, given everything that was not given, the injuries and avowals, the sinking into pleasure and union and grief, the marriage that might have been theirs.

  The baby was Nick. Her last-born.

  In summer she knew the time for resolve, the time for the truth was at hand; she put it off. School started. Daily, nightly, hourly she went over it, in bed at night, in the shower, in the car, in the teachers’ lounge gobbling potato chips, in class while heads were bent over the tests she had passed out and the smell of mimeograph ink on her hands was making her sick. At first it was just fog. Her mind sent low beams out into the fog and found nothing by which she could orient herself in order to make a decision.

  First she thought, I’ll wait, Cole will see when the baby is born, he’ll see. He’ll know, it will be taken out of my hands. But what cowardice, to hold off, to wait that way to be exposed. No, she couldn’t wait, she would have to tell Cole. The affair was over. She would start with that. There would be no mention of how boldly she had begun it, how knowingly waded out beyond her depth.

  And if the baby was Nathanael’s, as she believed, what did she think would happen to all of them when it was born? Nathanael had broken with her. Did she think he would see it and change his mind? And Cole—did she think Cole would leave her, leave his daughters? Or take them from her? Was that what she wanted to do to her family?

  Cole was strong. His confidence was a kind of muscle; it could repel a blow. She thought so then. And she was strong; she was going to start in on this baby’s life, on the practical arrangements—her leave from school, crib down from the attic, cardboard box of the little undershirts with snaps—for this third, late child.

  She had told Cole so many times in her mind that when she got started she was hardly aware she was really telling him. And then she didn’t do it—watching his face she fell back, she didn’t say lover. With elbows bearing down so hard on the table her arms and ribs ached by the time she stopped talking, she told him part of it.

  I went to bed with a man, she said. She said at a conference, and let it stand, the implied once.

  About the baby—suddenly motionless inside her as if listening—she said nothing. And neither did Cole. If it occurred to him to work out the dates, he gave no sign. This omission was almost worse than the rage she had feared. Rage would have been a sign of a certain objectivity.

  Cole’s lips were white; he could not complete a sentence or meet her eyes. “In that case . . .” he said several times, going no further, as if she were laying out a theorem to which he could supply only the little deltas, the therefores. He was rubbing grains of sugar into the kitchen table with his thumb as if he could rub out the grain of the maple.

  May was saying a man. She never spoke a name, never said love. Her skin felt starched. She had stumbled into this dignified way of talking and could not break out of it. This is me, she thought. I am this awful, troublemaking, greedy woman who makes up a ridiculous lie. All she was explaining to Cole seemed to refer to long ago. She had stopped fearing he would say, When? It was not good to be as free as he was leaving her, to despair of punishment. The girls were out; the house was quiet. All around them was a silence, ready to come forward and cover everything she had said. She made the silence an offering: no detail, no painful description would pass her lips, nothing more to hurt him. But he didn’t ask.

  You must be this way in the operating room, she thought, suddenly angry. No questions, just the thing at hand, just the slimy red flinching heart. But then she thought, All right, you have to be. That’s all right. Heaven help me if I make this your fault. She didn’t say she had smoothed the skirt of her red dress and walked in hypnotized celebration to an elevator, and after that gone shamelessly up to the desks of hotels alone, and seized hold of a man Cole had never seen, a man she loved.

  It was then that Cole said, “It’s his baby, isn’t it.”

  “It’s possible,” she said.

  Would that have been the right thing to do, tell the rest of it, the whole truth? The truth. If you packed it down the mass was still there. The chemical effect. If the effect of a little piece of the truth was as bad as that—the pinched lips, the face gone pale as his hair, eyes drained of blue, half shut as if she were waving something too close to them—what would more of it have done? What would more of it do, when the baby was brought to him, kicking its little dusky legs?

  But the baby that was born was not Nathanael’s child. He was Cole’s.

  His small square head was covered with the unmistakable flax. He had the little basking furrow from nose to upper lip that was Cole’s, and Cole’s defect, the little crimp in the crest of the ear. His eyes were the peerless fjord-blue.

  May looked into them, searching for what she had always felt with her babies, that slow dive of rapture. The baby. I will have to love him. I will have to get over it. I promised. She turned to the wall.

  If only she hadn’t said that. That spell. She had drawn her own blood. If only she hadn’t said, I’ll have to love him.

  The baby was jaundiced and she stayed with him in the hospital for ten days. That was what you did then. A social worker came to sit at her bedside before they let her take him home. “It will all come back to you,” the woman said, as if May had amnesia. “Normal feeling will return.”

  May said nothing about the affair, but the woman treated May as if she had something to hide, of which she could rid herself if she buckled down.

  The affair was over before she ever beheld her newborn. Nathanael had put a stop to it. She had destroyed his letters but she had the final one with her in the hospital, in her purse. He meant what he had said in that letter. He had prayed about it. He would take responsibility for whatever happened when the baby was born, and he would come to see Cole and bow his head and ask forgiveness. But he had had his fill of that life where someone is missing. He’d had the life of an absence; he wouldn’t bequeath it to his two sons still at home, the little ones.

  It was not secrecy or adultery that had decided him. Not the urgent, shamed messages in code that traveled from his school to hers. It was himself, a boy without parents.

  A faint thrill went through her at the thought of his big face clenched in prayer, with her as its subject. How strange, how unknown to her he was, when she had said to herself so many times, I know him. I don’t care how unlikely it is. If I had met him first, when I was twenty, I would have known. He would have known.

  She had written it in letters and said it aloud, and she was glad of that. But she was glad too that she had not done more, flown to his city, or begged any more than she had. She was glad her will had been diluted, and so little had been planned for in the way of a future for such meetings. Almost nothing. They had hardly begun. Yet the weight of him was on her, she could not move him, or remember what she had thought about before she thought about his sternness. His absorption in the church. His having had no mother. His nail with the mark, his hands, his carved eyelids, his full, gloomy face coming down to hers.

  May did know, in time, that at a late
r date little of what had happened to her and to her baby would have taken place. A drug would have been provided. The disturbed mother would not have cried at the sight of her baby being brought to nurse, and lost her milk and cried on thinly for weeks with the child crying beside her, instead of in her arms. Because—and she could not stop recalling this, wondering if she remembered it accurately—she had not held the baby. Not very much. She had kept him in the bed with her, not in his crib, but Laura, smelling of food, drying her hands and pushing up her wet sleeves, had come and scooped him up at all hours of the day, and walked up and down the room with him, murmuring and cooing, with her oily bangs falling over the thin curled fists he held up in front of his face as if he were still in the stage of petitioning to be born, still floating, anchored.

  “Laura, honey, take a bath, wash your hair,” May said weakly.

  “I will,” Laura said, laying her cheek passionately on the baby as if she could absorb him.

  “You wash yours.” It was Vera, the shadow at the door. She was speaking to May.

  Until he got pneumonia, the baby mostly slept while May did. Drugs for depression were different then; there were no drugs then at all, really, in normal life, the way there would be in a few years.

  Nothing that was coming was dreamed of. There were no essays being turned in at school, in a child’s handwriting, about nightmare drug trips. No hash, no windowpane. No pills, no angel dust.

  Or none that you heard of, saw, touched in wonder when you entered the kind of filthy room that someone—in a very few years there were people who would do this—would rent to a fifteen-year-old kid, a runaway, so that he could sell himself to buy drugs.

  No hallucinating sons trying to get in, at the back door in the rain, screaming, “The deck, no, no, look, the deck, it’s covered with snot!” while flashlights played from upstairs windows where the parents, figures in pajamas, old as ghosts, could be seen crouching in the dark.

  Nick was born in 1961. All that was to figure in his life had barely been born itself.

  Nick was not going to die, as May had feared when he was born small, in the first percentile, and “icteric,” as the chart said. Cole was allowed to read it because he was a doctor, and May read it over his shoulder. In those days you didn’t ask to see a chart, you didn’t come out with the words she had been repeating to herself in a weak snarl, “It’s my baby, what have you written about him?”

  She had had a C-section. She had labored and labored, until she heard the resident say, “He’s holed up in there and we’re going to have to go get him. Or her.”

  She knew it was a boy. In comparison the girls had come with a friendly ease. This had nothing easy about it.

  The yellow of the baby’s skin faded under the bilirubin lights, he gained a few ounces, and they allowed her to take him home. “I don’t think I can drive,” she said foolishly.

  “No one expects you to drive,” said Cole’s voice.

  In the car she cried and apologized for it, whispering, “What did they give me?”

  She meant drugs, but Cole said harshly, “They gave you your baby.” Through half-closed eyes May inspected the blond, tiny, floppy male thing that was her baby. The skin around his eyes where the eye patches had been taped was like chewed gum.

  At home, in Laura’s hands, the baby gained four ounces. When Cole came in at the end of the day Laura would place the baby in his arms, bring the bottle, arrange a diaper over Cole’s shoulder. But Cole didn’t like to put the baby to his shoulder, he liked to look him straight in the eye, roll the tiny fists in circles. He liked to sing to him. He produced a quavering falsetto. He would sit in the rocking chair May had used when both girls were babies and sing “Home on the Range,” and “Down in the Valley.” Give my heart ease, love, give my heart ease / Throw your arms round me, give my heart ease. May knew that song, and Oh! I long for Jeanie and my heart bows low / Never more to find her where the bright waters flow. She tried to open her eyes, to smile. Through a fog she could hear Cole, see him rocking. But who was he to her?

  The baby got pneumonia. He had a convulsion; he lay in the hospital with his bowlegs sticking out of a little tent. But he was not going to die of pneumonia; he was not going to die for years and years.

  “It’s all right,” May said. She was in the chair, resting her forehead on the bars of the aluminum crib. “Never mind.”

  “Was it real gold?” Vera said, biting her lips.

  They were talking about May’s locket, which Vera had lost. All three of them were gowned but not masked, because no one had told them to put on masks. That would make Cole so angry he would go out to the nurses’ station and call the head of pediatrics. He had the floor, the department, the whole building hopping for this son of his. There was a hush of sympathy among the nurses who had teased him when the girls were born, long ago, in another life; there was a narrowing of the eyes whenever May—they had teased May too, both times before—cried or came weaving to the door of the baby’s room and peered down the hall.

  “Who cares if it was gold?” Laura said sharply.

  “It’s all right. It was one of those necklaces they had in the mercantile back then, three or four of them hanging on a cardboard at the cash register. My sister got it for me, for my birthday.”

  “But it had your mother’s picture in it,” Laura persisted.

  Your mother. Grandma, to them, was her father’s second wife. May had never really believed they did not know the person she was talking about when she talked about her mother. My mother died, she had sometimes specified, to threaten the knowledge into them.

  “It did have her picture in it.”

  “What made you think you got to wear it?” Laura demanded. “You just went in their room and took it.”

  “Oh, Mom, oh—” Vera jumped up, knocking over the folding chair the nurse had brought in. Laura picked it up while Vera paced up and down the room with her arms crossed, holding herself by the little biceps and shaking her head. Vera was ten. She was not so much a dramatizer as a child who claimed things, people, occasions for herself. “Oh, I don’t know what could’ve happened! Honestly!”

  “It’s all right. Believe me, honey. It is.”

  “Oh, Mom.” Vera gave a sob. “I just went in your room so I could open it and look at the picture.”

  “Why don’t you shut up?” Laura said. “Really, Mom, can’t you make her? You’re the one whose locket is gone, and she’s howling. She wore it to softball!”

  “We went all over the diamond! We crawled around. We looked!”

  “Oh yeah. I’m so sick of it, I’m sick of it.” Laura had flushed almost purple—calm Laura. “I’ve had it with her. The baby’s so sick. She can’t be the center of everything that ever happens.” Laura shut her eyes. Then her voice lifted up in a moan, a strange, high, barking whine. “I hate her. The baby’s so sick. I know he’ll die!” She turned to May. “I hate you too! I hate you! You don’t even care!”

  It was then that Cole arrived. Laura sagged against the metal cart with the baby bottles. “Daddy,” she sighed, as if an elevator falling with her in it had set down softly.

  Cole had been in the operating room; his damp blond hair was marked by the strings of the mask that hung around his neck. The minute he came in he wheeled around and went out again, and they heard his voice raised at the nurses’ station. When he came back he had fresh, pressed masks for all four of them to put over their faces.

  He bent over the crib. At first May thought some fluid was springing out of the papery skin the baby had, discs of moisture squeezing out. Then she saw it was tears, dropping from Cole’s eyes. A sob broke from him. She heard a spring in the side of the crib give under his weight. She saw his head hanging over the baby’s legs, and felt a slow, spreading shock as she stared.

  She remembered Cole. She remembered him. It was the breakthrough of normal feeling the social worker had spoken of, the expected, the awaited relief. Cole. Poor Cole. The mask was sucked into his open mou
th so that he looked like a mummy. She followed his gaze down to the baby.

  Nicholas. They had all four chosen the name. Victory, it meant. Laura had bought a book of baby names.

  Both girls bent over their brother. Nicholas.

  A nurse said, from far away, “His penicillin.” His. Already the baby had things that were his. His IV. The nurse was working a needle into the IV line. A bigger needle was taped to his scalp, where the good veins were in babies, Cole said. All around the tape the skin was pulled and wrinkled. One of his eyes was crusty; he had scratched his cornea with a fingernail. His. His tiny fingernails, just cut. Hours ago May had seen the shreds fall as the nurse cut them. “Nobody fixed these little bitty nails for you, did they?”

  “So you thought you might open those blue eyes for a minute, huh?” This was the same nurse. With a little frown at May she said, “Your son sure can sleep.”

  Your son. Of course he can. Of course he sleeps. He’s sick and he’s afraid.

  My son.

  His blue eyes were open, roving, though his fingers lay passively curled. That was when the truth gave off a little of its chemical heat. My son. That was when the scalding began, that pain that will sometimes set off the fiercest indulgence, the wildest preference—the pouring down inside her scalp and shoulders and breasts, the scouring of her belly to its floor, the love for the baby Nicholas, the curse of love she had laid on herself.

  THREE

  Olga Sobol: Cole

  Along the highway following the river north the sun came out and they could see eagles sitting in the bare branches. The leaves were new, still a green film on bark. May counted nine eagles before her eyes fell shut.